To Tweet Or Not To Tweet? Depends On What You're Watching

5-10-13

Industry's First "Cultural Currency” Study Goes Beyond Conversation to Demonstrate How Viewers Really Use Social Media

Study Reveals How Twitter and Facebook Complement TV’s Brand-Building

New York, May 10, 2013 – Different media channels drive different social media behaviors. The findings were revealed today from the TVB, the not-for-profit trade association of America’s commercial broadcast television industry, in the organization’s 2013 Cultural Currency study. In conjunction with Colligent, a social affinity mapping company, TVB married Nielsen Media Research and Kantar Media data with social media behaviors (not conversation) across Twitter and Facebook to identify the quantity and intensity of behavior for broadcast and cable TV, radio and newspapers at the national and local level. The study has important implications for how TV programmers and marketers can effectively synchronize social media with their traditional media investments.

The Cultural Currency research analyzed social media behaviors among 167 million Facebook and Twitter users across 4400 primetime television programs, 540 consumer brands, 570 TV stations, 1823 radio stations and 358 local and national newspapers.

As more content producers and advertisers turn to social media to build and engage program and brand fans, this study provides a roadmap on how to build social media experiences that will maximize consumer engagement and help programmers and advertisers set the right action standards for success.

The findings showed that fan behaviors that drive Cultural Currency activate a different set of personal interactions and necessitate different strategies for brand engagement. Local broadcast TV viewers are 85% more likely to post photos and videos than users of all media (radio, newspapers, broadcast and cable television), primarily because of their strong connection to community. Local newspapers outperform all other media in generating retweets (54% more likely), while radio and cable TV users are avid content likers (each 46% more likely). Across all media channels, broadcast television offered the most balanced set of social media behaviors to activate across content offerings.

Brian Wieser, a leading media industry analyst at equity research firm Pivotal Research Group, highlighted the study’s importance. “This important research from the TVB highlights the growing inter-relationships between television, social media and second-screen content more generally.”

The study unearthed critical insights for programmers and advertisers who build complementary social media experiences to enhance their media investments, including:

Broadcast TV Builds Brand Fans With its Combination of Big Audiences and Deep Engagement.
Broadcast TV at the national and local level is still the dominant brand-builder in the media landscape, generating as much as 192X more brand fans within social media than advertisers in the same category who only purchased cable. The use of social media to prove the correlation of actual media investment with brand affinity is a game-changing insight that provides marketers with the ability to target their most engaged brand fans using the efficiencies of mass reach media.

Social Media Platforms Are Not Equal Across the Television Landscape.
There is a polarization of platform preference depending on the programming genre. Viewers of mainstream primetime genres, driven by big hit programs, exhibited more active behaviors on Twitter than on Facebook, suggesting that Twitter has established itself as the "in-the-moment," simultaneous platform for cultural currency traders and that "appointment viewing" is now an interactive "appointment experience" that offers advertisers more opportunities to engage in real-time.

“Mass culture that is accessible to many and used in social exchanges both online and off, provides the Cultural Currency needed to attract, maintain, and grow our relationships with others as well as with brands,” explained Stacey Lynn Schulman (formerly Koerner), Chief Research Officer at TVB. “In our eagerness to embrace technologies that enhance personalization and customization, our society has become more isolated, and mainstream media products, particularly broadcast TV, provides the glue that connects our virtual and physical lives. Just like monetary currencies, different cultural products provide different value in this new eco-system, and it’s not surprising that Broadcast Television - from local stations to national networks - excels in this regard.”

About TVB
TVB is the not-for-profit trade association of America’s commercial broadcast television industry. Its members include television broadcast groups, advertising sales reps, syndicators, international broadcasters, associate members and over 500 individual television stations. TVB actively promotes local media marketing solutions to the advertising community, and in so doing works to develop advertising dollars for the medium’s multiple platforms, including on-air, website and mobile. TVB provides a diverse variety of tools and resources, including this website, to support its members and to help advertisers make the best use of local ad dollars.